Puppeteer Christopher Godziuk counts on you to do so. He’s with Montreal’s Panadream Theatre which is presenting The Giant Magician, featuring marionettes and other puppets, at this weekend’s eighth annual Puppets Up! International Puppet Festival in Almonte. The two-day event spotlights 10 professional theatre troupes, street entertainment and more.

“There’s something that happens when an inanimate thing springs to life,” says Godziuk. “Because it’s not human, we believe it.”

And because we believe what it says – after all, what ulterior motive could a painted block of wood have? – we’re willing to buy into the story that the puppeteer spins.

The Giant Magician’s story is about a pizza delivery boy who dreams of becoming a magician. When he delivers food to the home of a world-famous magician, wondrous things start to happen. It’s a show aimed at audiences aged three to 10 and their families, and the story reminds audiences to pursue their dreams.

Puppets have other ways of connecting with us, says Kyla Read of Calgary’s Clunk Puppet Lab. The troupe’s show How I Became Invisible, for ages eight and up, is also on the Almonte bill.

It’s about Saija, an octogenarian struggling with Alzheimer’s who writes stories for her young granddaughter. Those tales, which like Saija’s deteriorating mind tread the border between fantasy and reality, include such characters as a woman who’s turning into a fish.

Read says it’s an important story to tell because so many younger people are seeing their grandparents descending into dementia. As well, our society often relegates both youngsters and the elderly to the sidelines, making them unexpected allies in vulnerability.

Using puppets to tell a story like this means the audience makes an extra investment, says Read. “Puppets aren’t humans with their own life stories, so it’s easier for the audience to put themselves into the puppets, to infuse them with whatever they want.”

The result: hopefully a deeper connection with the story.

For the puppeteer, she adds, it’s a chance for characters and plots to take directions they can’t in regular theatre. Puppets can seem to fly for example, breaking boundaries that hamstring flesh-and-blood actors and suggesting realities beyond the everyday.

Puppetry has a storied history in Asia and Europe where it’s long been aimed at adult audiences. In North America, not so much, says Ann Powell of Puppetmongers puppetry school and company in Toronto. That’s despite the strides made by folks like Canadian Ronnie Burkett whose adult puppet shows are internationally celebrated.

Although, says Powell, First Nations people had a puppetry tradition and there was a short-lived surge of adult puppetry in the United States during the Great Depression, like clothing styles the art form has gone in and out of fashion.

“What we’re left with is, it has to be for kids and it has to be educational. We’ve been trying to get out of that mire.”

Shows like Broadway’s War Horse, acclaimed for its life-size horse puppets, is helping the performance art become less of an outlier, she and others say.

Quebec, and especially Montreal, is a hotbed of puppetry according to Godziuk. The 11-day International Puppet Arts Festival in Jonquiere, Que., for example, runs for the 12th time this September. He credits the province’s passion for the performing arts in general as well as theatre pacesetters like Robert Lepage who have incorporated puppetry into their shows.

Children, who eat up festivals like the one in Almonte, are natural audiences for puppetry. The diminutive world on stage is one they relate to, and blocks of wood coming to life is no different than a doll becoming a baby or a backyard transforming itself into a jungle.

For adults — hard-nosed realists who put our faith in observable fact — puppets are a bit of a risk. They can seem creepy, maybe because they suggest that the boundary between safe, workaday reality and some other, more expansive existence is less definitive than we pretend.

One way or the other, says Read, “I see this as a very exciting time for puppetry.”

Puppets Up! International Puppet Festival

Where: Almonte, Ont.

When: Aug. 11 and 12

Tickets and information: puppetsup.ca, 613-256-3881

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